Meddling kids
PESKY, adj. Yesterday afternoon I was with my quarantine pod, having a drink in the sunshine. One of the kids in our pod, a four year old with a fantastic vocabulary, returned from running around the yard to investigate the snack situation and then declared, “You ate all the grapes, you pesky little grownups!”
A false accusation, but still the best sentence I’ve heard all week.
“Pesky” is of uncertain origin—we love a mystery—but it’s most likely an alteration “pest” or of the less common adjective “pesty.” I’m sure we can all agree, by this point in the pandemic, that pestilences are “confounded, annoying, disagreeable, abominable, hateful,” which is the OED’s definition of “pesky.” I was hoping the OED would specify that we get from “pestilence” (as in plague) to “pest” (as in garden-devouring critters) via the Exodus story and the locusts, but no dice. Even classical Latin pestis can be a plague, an unspecified instrument of death and destruction, or “a nuisance,” so the word has had a broad definition for a long time now.
“Pest” also used to be in use as a curse (pest take you, pest upon you, etc.), and living through a pestilence, that feels like a pretty serious thing to yell at someone. “Pest take you” is basically “I hope you die,” which I wouldn’t say to anyone except some members of the United States government. Sometimes altering the sound of a word softens the meaning, like “gosh,” and if I had to guess, that’s what happened with “pesky.” Maybe as we downgraded the danger of “pest” from deadly plague to insect to anything mildly annoying, we started saying “pesky.”
I also thought perhaps “pest” (troublesome person or thing) and “pester” (to trouble, bother, annoy) were related, and they have become related, but “pester” originally comes from Middle French “empestrer,” meaning to impede or entangle, related to Latin “pedica,” a shackle for the foot, and thus to the word “impeach,” which I’ve treated before. Through sound association with “pest,” the verb “pester” came to mean “to bother” instead of “to impede.”
Anyway—pest take me if I lie—I might be a pesky little grownup, but I did not eat all the grapes.
L’Automne or La Grappe de Canaan by Nicolas Poussin, painted between 1660 and 1664
In small-r romance, this week I read
A Little Bit Wild (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Victoria Dahl. Whether she’s writing contemporary or historical, Dahl writes unapologetically hornt women, and I love her for it. Reader reviews are often blisteringly negative when heroines make mistakes and are selfish, especially a heroine like this one who (gasp) has sex for pleasure, while heroes can have an OED-length list of flaws and still be beloved. This is, obviously, total bullshit. The only way I know how to respond is to love all the messy, screw-up women characters even more. Content warnings: sex, blackmail, jealousy.
A Touch of Stone and Snow (het m/bi? f, both cis, fantasy) by Milla Vane. I first mentioned this book back in July, so it took me some time to get through it, but sometimes it’s nice to savor something. These books have such big, complicated worldbuilding and they’re just so unabashedly, colorfully magic—a snarky saber-toothed tiger, deadly stone wraiths, sacred sex, other things I can’t list because they’re spoilers. Unlike the first book in the series, this one has two absolute sweethearts as protagonists. Content warnings: sex, death, violence, alcoholism, mentions of rape.
Everything I read on the internet this week was depressing so I’m opting not to link any of it. Please accept this beautiful edit of Star Wars sound effects replaced by Cardi B:
See you next week, pesky little readers!
